[Music] [Music] I'm Charlotte McLoud with investing news.com and here today with me is Mark scon editor and chief at forecast and strategy and professor at chatland University thank you so much for joining me great it's been a pleasure I just arrived here in New Orleans I've been here by the way virtually every conference since like 76 so I'm I'm a pretty much a regular here at the New Orleans gold bug conference gold conference yes yes really good to be be meeting you it's our first time talking


and you know I'm sure our audience will be familiar with you but for those who might not be I wondered if you could give just a brief introduction to yourself and your work yeah so I'm a an applied Economist uh Financial Economist I have a PhD in economics in monetary economics uh at George Washington University University and unlike a lot of people I've had a lot of Real World Experience uh uh running businesses making money losing money and I also write an investment newsletter since


1980 I've written about 25 books and uh and have taught economics at Columbia University as well as currently at Chapman University so been to 77 countries I've been married and my wife and I are celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary this year and have five children eight grandchildren so that's kind of a nice little summary of uh of My Life The Cliff Notes thank you for that you bet okay so as as we' mentioned we're here in New Orleans at the investment conference and people come


here they want to know where the best places to put their money are so I wanted to start there and ask you where you're seeing the most opportunities at the moment well I do think that uh that there's a something you you you said they come here to find out what their be best way to to make money is and and I think there's a very strong ideology here uh of gold being representing sound money uh and uh I've been a part of that in the 1970s uh that was the inflationary 7s and we went off the gold


standard and gold went up to $800 an ounce so my very first investment was actually a silver dollar rather than stocks and bonds but when when Ronald Reagan was reelected or was elected president in 1980 that was a sea change where um there was an effort to fight inflation and so stocks and bonds became a more popular vehicle and gold had gold has struggled ever since then and it so it's more cyclical so as far as where to invest your money I've always believed that most of your money should be in the


traditional stock and bond markets as long as we maintain basically a free enterprise system and I think the United States suffers from a lot of problems that have kept the stock market from rising uh particularly in in recent times but gold and silver do play a role in your portfolio I believe in a well Diversified portfolio if you looked at my newsletter forecast and strategies I have stocks I have income Investments dividend paying stocks I have gold and silver uh uranium I'm recommending that


now because that's in a bull market but but Commodities are cyclical and uh stocks and bonds are cyclical as well so you have to you have to choose the right time to buy yeah yeah you know before you're kind of explaining this to me before we got started and and how maybe unlike a lot of people here you don't see gold as such a major part of the portfolio so I was asking you know what what reaction do you get to that when you come into a place like this and you know how much of the portfolio should be in Gold can we


go into that a little bit more yeah and the best way to tell that is a story like five years ago I came to this conference when the stock market was in the mother of all bull markets and hitting new highs and uh I was extoling the virtues of the stock market and afterwards uh three or four uh investors came up to me and said well we we've lost 70% of our money and I said how's that possible with a market at alltime high and he said well we bought all those penny stocks and gold did not do


particularly well and so the penny stocks fell out of fashion and so um I warned warn people you you put too much in that you know you might want to speculate with 5% of your portfolio and some penny stocks but you don't want you you want to stay with businesses that work uh and Mining is a very tough business it's a low margin business they don't make a lot of money a lot of gold uh gold uh and Silver Mines lose money every year so the only way they benefit is from higher gold and silver prices


there's a lot of Hope at these conferences so I I give a warning signal to people and I'll be doing that here in my my major speech here so it's called the courage to be disliked uh and I'm recommending my own strategy of Diversified portfolio and not going overboard with gold and silver it plays a role and we may be entering a period where gold will do better and silver would do better I'm very big on uranium right now because uh that's an alternative energy source I don't know


if you want to talk about uranium oh I would love to yes yes maybe maybe I'll ask you a followup on gold and one of the things based on what you're seeing so a lot of people here are looking at what's going on in the markets and they're wondering why is the gold price not higher so for you do you think we're at an appropriate level at the mods gold has hit $200 an ounce like six times and then retreated and it did it again it hits $200 $2,000 an ounce and then it backed off again now may at some point I


think it's going to crash through and go go to new high levels uh but one of the reasons is the Federal Reserve is aggressively raising rates they're raising rates faster than they have in 20 years so when you do that gold doesn't pay any interest so you're up against uh interest bearing Investments dividend paying stocks that are doing much better in terms of a yield gold doesn't pay a yield so they gold does much better in a low interest rate environment we don't have that right now


a high interest rate so the only way I think gold will break through and stay above 2,000 if the dollar becomes weak and the dollar is not going to become weak until interest rates start coming back down and that will cause the dollar to drop because gold is quoted in dollars and if the dollar is strong go gold is going to be weak or is is going to be lackluster so I look at the dollar as a critical element here right and I imagine when you're talking about interest rates going back down you know


I think people are looking to next year and saying okay probably that's when the FED starts to make its retreat but I imagine you'd be looking for more than like a quarter point decrease to to give a boost to the gold price and I don't think that's going to happen unless there's an actual Financial or monetary crisis and that could happen because the dollar is so strong and most of these Emerging Market debt for example is all in US Dollars and they're paying these very high interest rates and they're not


going to be able to pay that off so I think there's going to be Emerging Market debt crisis when that happens the FED is going to uh cut interest rates probably pretty sharply because the fear of contagion that this will spread and create a financial crisis and the US is in no position to have a a a major recession because if we do that means the deficit is going to balloon even more the national debts going to get out of hand so the FED doesn't want that but they may get it nevertheless okay so


interesting so you see possibly this Emerging Market crisis and then it spreads over into the US and and the reason I ask is because we hear may even be by the way may even be we've had already had a banking crisis once in 2022 and that could happen in the us as well because again what is it that most uh Banks hold they hu have huge positions in US bonds long-term bonds well those those prices the price of bonds have dropped sharply down 30% in the last year or two and that has devastated the portfolio and a lot of


people a lot of wealthy uh uh Bank uh people who have money in banks are withdrawing their money and that's what caused the crisis in 2022 and it could happen again in 2023 or 24 okay okay and so I think people look at these circumstances and maybe people at this conference think okay well I don't really want to be in the stock market in that case because that sounds like something bad could happen but for you you if you're looking at that more Diversified approach that includes the


stocks how does that work for you well I'm more conservative there so I would recommend gold itself and I do in my newsletter forecast and strategies I do have a gold position GLD is the I um I think it's the spider gold shares GLD is the symbol and I'm recommending that because if you have a stock market crash everything drops including gold stocks so but gold itself would go up and that has been the tradition in a crisis so to me a gold is your best position to protect yourself from a a


stock market crash or at least a major bare Market I'm not calling for a crash for SE because in the US we have circuit breakers that keep a crash from happening dramatically and we have the plunge Protection Team uh uh which is uh the treasury the SEC uh government officials who are prepared at any time to inject liquidity and to buy quantitative easing and all that sort of thing to turn things around so even even in a crisis scenario you don't see that going too far cuz they will step I see a mini crash but not a


major crash because of all of these factors that are keeping it from happening right and so so you would have your just to talk a little bit more of portfolio allocation you'd have your your gold for protection and then how how does how's the rest looking well I like dividend paying stocks Rising dividends High dividends uh that have uh stood the test of time you don't want to get overboard with excessively High interest rates you you want to make sure that uh the dividend the earnings can


cover the dividend but there are several oil and gas companies that are really good uh private in private Equity Investments uh I recommended a number of those where they have a long-term Rising dividend policy and that cushions the fall yes the stocks are going to drop but it cushions the fall and sometimes they even raise interest rates I remember one of my pipeline companies actually raised their dividend during the 2008 2009 crisis so even though the stock was down 40% I said wow they're


raising their dividend that's a positive sign keep buying and then they've fully recovered okay okay and since you mentioned oil and gas maybe we look over to uranium because that's on the energy side as well uh I know a lot of our audience is interested in that sector they're excited to see the price moving but wondering you know what's the trajectory forward so what are what are your thoughts there well there's no question probably uranium is one of the fastest uh bull markets right now it was


at $50 a pound uranium was at $50 a pound a year ago now it's at $74 a pound that's a pretty substantial move and the uranium stocks and the uranium ETFs are moving uh along with it so I have a position in forecas and strategies in uranium uh and I chose a company that's actually making money in uranium because a lot of companies are losing money even at these higher prices so I wanted a company it's only selling for 133 times earning so it's it's doing really well and we've already made a good 20 30% but


I think it has upward momentum because nuclear power is coming back finally the environmentalists recognize that it's a safe secure way and it's much more productive than even fossil fuels and certainly much more productive than U than solar and and uh these other methods of wind and so forth that really have to be subsidized uranium doesn't really need to be sub subsidized although it is government controlled a lot more than than than other uh Commodities Okay so we've covered kind


of some of the elements that investors should pay attention to in the market right now one that is a little bit more forward looking we have 2024 is going to be an election year in the US and I wondered if we could talk a little bit about that and and what that could mean for for investors see the FED policy is so aggressive and they've raised interest rates so high so fast and the money supply is not growing much at all uh you definitely have a Tight money policy right now which does pre possibly mean a recession in 2024


and that's good for the Republicans the Republicans should be able to take advantage of it now of course Donald Trump is a wild card there because I think he's blundered repeatedly and uh that would be a dangerous situation but you think the house and the Senate would would move to the Republic side at least and so that's positive for uh for oil and gas for tax relief and uh so forth they Republicans have not been very good on deficit relief however I have to criticize the Republicans for not you


know they love the tax cuts but uh as far as actual government spending reducing it they have they have a checkered past in that regard but I think it is positive for Republicans which tends to be Pro in pro- free enterprise and Market solutions to global warming and our environmental problems so um I think generally speaking that's good for investing yeah and you know you mentioned recession I I think people have a lot of questions about that as well including well we want to see if it's going to happen and then how how


deep how long do you have any thoughts on that so it totally depends on the Federal Reserve but I must admit that 2023 has been much more resilient to a recession we haven't had a recession uh so far so maybe that's because the lockdown uh after the lockdown the economy came back and it's just trying to catch up with the supply chain uh uh limitations and scarcities and shortages and that sort of thing and the markets responding to that so that could be an element that is going on there um and certainly fiscal policy the


government under the Biden Administration has been very stimulative very very aggressive and running deficits and stimulating the economy the economy may be growing on that but you can't do that forever we're headed for a a fiscal debt crisis at some point uh an interest rate the cost of financing the deficit is rising dramatically with these interest rate hikes so it's a very dangerous game that is going on right now so that actually bodess well for gold as an investment it it does yeah I


think I guess people turn know if they'll be happy to hear that was not really good news but nevertheless at least there a way to protect yourself in case that does happen yeah so I think we've gone over a lot of points any anything else that you think investors should be paying attention I know there's lots of things but key things that we haven't talked about that you're watching yeah so I am concerned about um Global instability uh we now have two major Wars going on we could have a


third with China and Taiwan there's really that the spreading of world war could be a serious destabilizing factor in the economy again very positive for gold and defense stocks and things like that there are always ways to protect yourself in these kinds of environment but we need to be alert to that my my experience is my attitude uh my motto is know the signs of the times when it comes to what's going on and that's why people subscribe to my monthly newsletter with a hotline every Monday you just to try to keep up


on everything that's going on in the world and that's another Hots spot another danger that we need to be alert to okay I'm going to finish with what I I've been calling it a fun question we'll see if it's fun um for investors what are some dos and don'ts as we head into the end of 2023 and into 2024 so I've written a book called The maximums of Wall Street and uh it's uh available in in bookstores as well as my as scowen books.com if people want to buy it at a


discount so that's in its 10th edition and uh there's some great quotes in there about the marketplace um uh Bulls uh Bears make headlines Bulls make money that's often uh a good one to remember but also um there's quite a few really great quotes from people who realize you have to be aware of the Doomsday scenario because bullmark has climb a wall of worry and uh most of the time there's something to be there's some negative news out there that could keep you from being in investing but uh Adam


Smith the founder of free marketing Comics it's his 300th birthday I've given a number of lectures on Adam Smith and he was always an optimist he said despite the uh the greatest errors of administration everybody tries to do their best to improve their own condition so um I actually think that that we we need to be optimistic uh and be realistic but also optimistic and not get too carried away with the doom day scenarios which is very diff very easy to do at this conference it is yes I


have left in some years and been like oh my goodness world is world coming to a Hell in a hand basket the apocalypse has arrived and yet it's constantly being postponed isn't it yes we're not there yet so that's that's great advice and my cooworker I believe got a copy of your book the one you were talking about for yeah we were looking through it so that was that was very good yeah it's about 800 quotes some short stories and so forth and uh yeah it's it's done really


well it's sold over 50,000 copies wow okay okay well we'll wrap it up there I'll I'll let you go thank you so much for making it here to speak with me I know you I think you came straight from the airport so I really appreciate it now I'm going in to give a panel and then my keynot speech perfect okay well I hope they both go well thank you so much all right Charlotte thank you okay and once again I'm Charlotte the cloud with investing.com and Miss SP SC thank you for watching if you like


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